Author: haroonkhan
-
CIVILIZATIONAL APPROACH TO CHANGE
As a discipline, history has primarily addressed the past. It is described as a chronology—describing events in a time sequence, related to particular societies. But some historians engaged themselves in examining the course of civilizations and offering theories of change. Rather than focusing on origins, these historians talked about the growth of cultures and civilizations…
-
DIFFUSIONIST THEORIES
Alongside evolutionary theories, there developed the theories of diffusion, which underlined the phenomenon of cultural contact and mutual borrowing of ideas and artefacts. As we have seen, it is the diffusionist dimension that was incorporated in the revised theories of evolution, called multilineal and neo-evolutionary. Providing a corrective to evolutionary theorists, the diffusionists asserted that…
-
MULTILINEAR EVOLUTIONISM
The unilineal evolutionary theories as well as theories of universal evolutionism were disputed by many. They were regarded as conjectural history and fieldworkers found data from their specific ethnographic studies to falsify them. The stages were not found to be universally true, nor was the unilineal sequence observed everywhere. Neo-evolutionism was the first in a…
-
UNILINEAR EVOLUTION THE STAIRCASE THEORY
What Morgan propounded is generally known as the theory of unilinear evolution. It purports that there is a single dominant line of evolution, and that all societies pass through the same stages. Since the pace of ‘progress’ differs from society to society, those with a slower pace were placed on the lower rungs of the ladder, compared…
-
Introduction
Human Society has a much longer history than the social sciences devoted to its study. Efforts are continually being made to reconstruct our past by pre-historians, archaeologists and scholars of ancient history. In doing so, they have searched for whatever credible evidence they could gather, mostly in the form of artefacts and elements of material…
-
Situating Change in Sociological Theory
The demography of society is constantly changing with the birth, growth and death of its members. It also changes due to migration—members leaving the society (emigration) or outsiders arriving and settling down (immigration) temporarily or permanently; migration changes the ratio of insiders and outsiders. The outsiders contribute to a society’s multicultural character. Changes also occur…
-
BPL Measures by Government of India
For our purposes, it will suffice to mention the measures adopted by the Planning Commission in recent years to identify the families Below the Poverty Line. We refer to the measures employed while drafting the Tenth Plan (2002–07). In its Tenth Five-Year Plan (2002–07) survey, BPL for rural areas was based on the degree of…
-
The Poor Identified in Antyodaya
In 1977, the Government of Rajasthan initiated a programme named Antyodaya, meaning the rise of the last. This name was borrowed from one of the Gandhian strategies for the amelioration of poverty. The modality adopted for its operation was, however, very different. Antyodaya focused on individual poor families, particularly the poorest of the poor. For their identification, the Programme…
-
Dandekar-Rath Method of Poverty Line
In their study of Poverty in India, V. M. Dandekar and Nilkanth Rath used the concept of poverty line. They constructed the poverty line based on the income required for a person to purchase a given calorie norm of food per day. At the 1960–61 price levels, these authors fixed poverty line at 15 for rural areas and 22.50…
-
PPP Estimates of GNP Per Capita
It is calculated by converting GNP to US dollars on the basis of purchasing power parity rather than the exchange rate. The calculation is made by converting one unit of the currency (the US dollar, in this case) into the number of units of national currency required to buy some defined goods and services in…